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LETTER TO AN (UNNAMED) WEBSITE OWNER WHO THINKS HATE SPEECH IS THE SAME AS AN OPINION

Dear Ms. Website Owner:

Shame on you. A few days ago I put a few words into the Google search tool about a subject I was interested in, and found my way to your story about it. I then had the misfortune of reading the third comment down, which was hateful and beyond appalling. I wrote to you privately, asking you to take the comment down because it is clearly “hate speech” and specifically because of the terrible pain it would cause its intended target. I carefully explained my reasons for asking this, which I won’t identify because I don’t really want to call attention to the particulars, except to make a larger point about the prevalence of “hate speech” presuming to masquerade as “opinion” or “free speech” in our culture, and whose responsibility it is to take a stand. Your response to my request to take it down?

As a fellow blogger I am disappointed that you would want me to censor my readers. I don’t know what kind of blog you run, but (my website) receives (x number) of unique visitors a year and we take our readers’ freedom of speech very, very seriously. Although I do not see eye to eye with many of the comments that are left by my readers, I do respect their right to have an opinion.

Now I admit that you’re not alone in misguidedly offering an unrelated principle to boost a specious argument, Ms. Shopping and Gossip Blog Owner. And this kind of garbage seems to be everywhere–on television, in the unbelievable amount of name-calling in this culture, in the unkind way people talk to each other, even on big, influential, serious Internet sites like Salon and Slate, which are presumably run and edited by educated, responsible people. Personally, I think it’s easy to distinguish between hate speech and an “opinion.” It’s like Justice Potter Stewart’s notion that hard-core pornography is hard to define, but he knew it when he saw it. But obviously you need clarification, so here’s the Wikipedia definition: “Hate speech is communication that vilifies a person or a group on the basis of color, disability, ethnicity, gender, nationality, race, religion, sexual orientation, or other characteristic.”

So give me a break. I would vigorously defend your right to publish your blog, even if I don’t particularly like its voyeuristic and strange focus on the misfortunes of others, but do you REALLY think allowing hate speech on a shopping and gossip blog makes you a virtuous defender of “free speech?”

First of all, if that commenter were exercising free speech, he wouldn’t be hiding his identity, and behind a disgusting moniker yet. Secondly, many websites do ban hate speech; Facebook, for example, bans (according to its own definition) violence and threats, bullying and harassment, hate speech, graphic content, nudity and pornography, and phishing and spam. Some websites leave a placeholder, something like, “THIS COMMENT REMOVED.” Some may have policies on such things but don’t enforce them particularly well. Shame on them too.

Perhaps when you’re not promoting gossip and shopping you’re a law scholar, and you really are one of those free speech absolutists who say all expression, no matter how despicable, should be allowed online. So then where are all the spam comments? Ah. Your spam filter edits those out, right? Well, that’s free speech too, so obviously you’re not a free speech absolutist, now are you? It is, after all, someone’s “opinion” that penises should be larger, and that they can be made so with a product called PENIS ERECTOR, and if free speech is what you care about, why not allow all that up there in addition to the Prada and hate speech?

Now people (and governments) may disagree on what governments should and shouldn’t protect, but you’re not a government. This has nothing to do with free speech; YOU OWN THE SITE. And you’re making a choice here, an unkind and hateful one, an uncivil one.

Ms. Website Owner, what’s the downside to editing out hate comments? Would it hurt your cause of more shopping and gossip? All it would do is deprive the hater of a forum to anonymously spew hate. Yes, I believe that the answer to hate speech is more speech, and I see now that a few people are dressing that commenter down in follow up, some with name-calling almost as bad, which of course makes my point, that we’re so steeped in this junk that we can’t see our way out. Nevertheless, if the comment’s intended target, who is already suffering from unspeakable pain, were ever to see that first comment, it might STILL bring even more unspeakable pain. Do you really want to do that? Do you have no empathy? Didn’t your mother teach you anything about morality, civility, kindness?

And while you’re leaving that placeholder, I suggest you do the same for all comments by this person, who seems to be trolling your site for ways he can say the most indecent, hateful things and do the most damage to his targets. He’s obviously very sick. If you provide a forum for this individual, it doesn’t make you a defender of free speech. I’m not sure what it makes you, but it isn’t anything good.

If no one takes responsibility for anything in this culture, if people hide behind meaningless and unrelated principles, where the hell are we? The Dalai Lama said, “There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.”

I almost lost my breakfast this morning upon reading in today’s New York Times that a man named Pedro Hernandez, who confessed to police last week to murdering six-year-old Etan Patz thirty-three years ago, also confessed to some relatives and to a charismatic Christian group thirty years ago. I can’t even imagine how Etan’s parents feel.

This “Christian” group apparently encouraged (or maybe still encourages) participants to “feel the Holy Spirit and unburden themselves of guilt for their sins.” The Times further describes the charismatic Christian gathering in Camden that Mr. Hernandez attended 30 years ago a “free-for-all of admissions of guilt, sometimes shocking.” Furthermore, the article says, the “groups grow hardened and numb to hearing them,” and that one Mr. Rivera explained it by saying that it wasn’t his “place” to tell because the confession wasn’t made to him alone, one-on-one, but to the group.

This is probably an accurate expression of Mr. Rivera’s own psychological rationalization. But wow. That is some religion. Defenders of religion often try to say that we need religion to instill morality, and manage to ascribe this kind of immorality to zealots of “other” religions, but how do we find the morality in any philosophy that would encourage silence and rationalization in the face of such a confession? How do we reconcile an ethic that finds the “Holy Spirit” powerful enough and sufficient to relieve the guilt of a child murderer? Or that puts protected confession above any feeling of empathy for the parents of that murdered little boy? How do we cope with a religion that puts so called “faith” above a proper, conscience-guided sense of right and wrong? Examples abound of religion–all religions, in history and currently–encouraging blind adherence to zealotry and faith, and/or protection of a misguided, entrenched hierarchy over the development of a moral conscience that can distinguish right from wrong, but really, this all still all reminds me of Eichmann’s Nuremberg defense that he was ” just following orders.”

One has to wonder what other confessions these people heard. Isn’t there a priest somewhere who understands and can distinguish right from wrong, and could have advised these people?

Dear Bruised Muse readers, I’m posting this email series between me and “T,” because, although I found her response to some of my recent writing kind of lovely and sweet (if somewhat misguided), I also found our exchange quite thought provoking and worrying. In my anger management classes, I’ve heard people express similar “spare the rod, spoil the child” ideas. “T” has given me permission to post this anonymously, and I hope readers will find it interesting too.

Dear Ms. Dorf,

I have no idea how I started reading about you, but somehow I stumbled across two posts written by you in one day. One was on McSweeney’s site (Open Letter to the Radio Lady) and one was on your own site about bereavement. As I write this, I sit here with a gigantic lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. I cannot breathe. Nothing I can say about the loss of your son can sound anything other than trite and simplistic. I cannot offer you condolences that mean anything, I do not know you, I did not know your son. Please bear with me. I am aware that what I am about to write is not entirely appropriate and may even stray over the border-line of “this woman needs help.”

I have a son. I remember waiting, almost with baited breath, until he turned seven months old. For me, at that time, that was the magic number. Once he was seven months old, nothing could possibly happen to him. Of course, as soon as he turned seven months old the magic number became 12 months. And then 15 months. And so on… He is now 26 months old. I cannot imagine my life without him. I do not want to. The thing is, ever since I became a mother, stories about children, ANY children, affect me almost as if they were my own. Happy stories make me tear up in joy, and think of ways I could somehow transfer that joy to my son’s life. Sad stories make me cry to the point of depression, and then I just want to encase him in a bubble and protect him forever. I do not know if this is ‘normal’. I know that this is MY ‘normal’.

My own childhood was complicated and abusive. I spend every day caught in a tailspin of endless second-guessing, analysing, terrified of somehow unknowingly abusing my son.

I wanted to write to you because I want to give you a hug. I really do. I want to give Michael a hug and tell him he has an amazing mom. Who, even after spending 21 years in a cycle of grief that I cannot even begin to comprehend, managed to reach out over hundreds and thousands of miles to a complete stranger and touch her life, and maybe even save it.

I don’t know what it is about your story about Michael and dealing with the tragedy that has prompted this email to you. I know that even on the worst of my days, what I go through is nothing compared to what you deal with on a daily basis. And that puts a lot of things into perspective for me.

I apologize if any of this has offended you. If nothing else, please re-read the part in bold and delete the rest. I’m not the best at explaining what’s going on in my head and heart.

Thank you for sharing your story.

BIG hugs,

T

* * *

Dear T.

Thanks for reaching out. I’m so glad you find me, and my resilience, and my writing inspiring. I’m glad you feel I’ve been able to touch your life, although I would deny that a stranger (or anyone) can “save” it. Only you can do that.

I think you may misunderstand my writing to some degree, perhaps because I’m sometimes able to take on the “voice” of bereavement, which only means it’s effective writing, not that I’m still suffering and need condolence, although I certainly thank you anyway. Let me assure you I haven’t spent 21 years in a “cycle of grief.” (Or even 17 years, since my son died when he was three and a half in 1994.) Even though my loss is always with me, one way or another, I have a full, rich, happy life. Much of my healing has been and remains in my writing. I have found some sort of meaning in the loss, partly by starting (with my husband) a program for toddlers with special needs in memory of our son, partly by becoming a more compassionate person, and partly by studying, training, and making myself available to help others look at their pain, trauma, whatever they struggle with. One of my special gifts is to be able to help people articulate their story through writing, although I use other techniques as well, like more traditional talk therapy.

I’m not offended by your letter, but I am worried about you and your son. I do see that you may be suffering. Of course you want to protect your son. Every mother does. But it does sounds to me as if you have a whole lot of debilitating fear and anxiety around your son’s safety and well-being that may come from some childhood issues you haven’t dealt with. How difficult for you to “spend every day caught in a tailspin of endless second-guessing, analyzing, and being terrified of somehow unknowingly abusing your son.”

Here are two options:

1. With your permission, I can post your letter on my blog anonymously, maybe give a little fuller answer. That would be interesting for my blog, maybe for you too. However, no quick answer could possibly tackle what you’ve described.

2. Much more importantly, have you ever talked to a therapist or other counselor? Or perhaps, if you like to write, we could figure out a way for me to help you articulate your story in writing, which might help you work through some of your pain, anxiety, and issues related to the trauma of growing up in an abusive home. Or perhaps there’s someone in your area? Really, I recommend you do some sort of therapeutic work.

Best,

Fran Dorf

*******

Hi Ms. Dorf,

Thank you for replying to my email. To be honest, my email may have sounded a tad dramatic. A little background – my hubby has been out of town for the past couple of weeks on work, I’m exhausted with looking after my son and trying to work from home (I’m a web designer) and the day I read your posts I was just wrecked. I was extremely affected by your writing, and the loss of your son upset me greatly. Your writing moved me – and I am amazed by your strength and resilience. And to build on that by being a therapist and helping others is truly inspiring.

Of course you can post my letter on your blog, but please do remove my son’s name as well as my own.

I think maybe I did misunderstand your post. I was thinking about the closure one, how someone who has lost a child cannot really get closure, but I think you were saying that it is possible to move on without HAVING to have closure? Is this closer to the mark?

I saw a psychologist when I was younger, (I think I was fifteen or so) and because of the way I was then, I basically manipulated her into thinking I was okay with the abuse (also because I wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t sharing everything with my mom). My issues stem from my mother, with whom I have a very complicated relationship – I love her to bits but am so incredibly angry with her for what she did to me and my brother during our childhood. I cannot confront her about this, because she has blacked it out (she was on a cocktail of pills at the time) and because she had her own issues. I come from an Indian background where going against your parents is sort of out of the question, let alone confronting them on any level. The abuse we endured was physical (beatings) and emotional (she would sometimes make us hit her or say things like, ‘if you do this it means you don’t love me’ – this being stupid things like walking on cracks in the sidewalk).

I’ve seen a counselor more recently which has helped quite a bit. My husband and I started seeing him after I found some emails that indicated that my husband was having an emotional relationship with another woman. This started a year or so after our son was born and devastated me – I was already quite depressed from PPS, and my husband and I decided to see a counselor together. I also sought help in single sessions for my anger management (I lash out verbally when I’m angry, which is part of the problem between my hubby and I). I would have liked to have continued with these sessions but we moved to a different city. There is no English-speaking counsellor here, and the psychiatrists/psychologists all charge upwards of 150 euros an hour which I cannot afford. We live in Germany by the way. My husband is Irish and I’m Indian.

About the tailspin: I make it a point to not hit my son in anger, EVER. If I get that mad or frustrated I leave the room for a bit. When he does get smacked he gets smacked on the hand, and it’s usually the third strike rule. However, at the end of the day, I find myself analysing and picking apart my behaviour to make sure I haven’t abused him. Of course, I may well be doing it all wrong (God knows, my mom probably thought she was doing the right thing at the time) and not knowing it. What keeps me sane is my son’s behaviour. He is a cheerful, adventurous and gentle little boy, and his caregivers at the play group he goes to just love him to bits. So I take that as encouragement that I’m on the right track. I try not to let my anxiety spill over into his life.

Good grief, I really have rambled on, haven’t I? In short, I have good days and bad days, on the bad days I think of people like you, and a couple of other writers and it snaps me out of my funk. In essence, that is what I wanted to tell you.

Thank you again for your kind words.

All the best,

T.

******

Dear T.

You do sound as if you’ve had a lot to deal with in your life. I’m very glad you got some counseling and feel that it has helped. I’m very sorry you feel counseling is too expensive now; perhaps there’s a public clinic that would cost less but still provide you with the treatment and support you may need. Or maybe you can find a good clinician who’s willing to take a reduced fee.

It’s great that you walk away from your son when you’re feeling angry. This is what we call taking a “timeout,” and it’s a great practice for anger control.

Now obviously there are cultural differences in the world around child rearing, but I can’t let this go without saying that I do not believe in spanking children no matter what they do, either hitting them on the buttocks, the face, the arm, the hands, or any other way. Here are a few other of many reasons. (Much of this is taken from here (www.naturalchild.org/) and here (http://www.askdrsears.com):

1. Children learn what parents model for them. Dr. Sears tells the classic story about the mother who believed in spanking as a necessary part of discipline until one day she observed her three- year-old daughter hitting her one-year-old son. When confronted, her daughter said, “I’m just playing mommy.” This mother never spanked another child. Hitting children teaches them to become hitters themselves. Witness your own situation. Your mother beat you and now you hit your child and worry about abusing him.

2. Spanking demonstrates that it’s all right for people to hit people, and especially for big people to hit little people, and stronger people to hit weaker people, and you solve a problem with a good swat. A child whose behavior is controlled by spanking is likely to carry on this mode of interaction into other relationships with siblings and peers, and eventually a spouse and offspring.

3. Research supports a direct correlation between corporal punishment in childhood and aggressive or violent behavior in the teenage and adult years. Virtually all of the most dangerous criminals were regularly threatened and punished in childhood. It is nature’s plan that children learn attitudes and behaviors through observation and imitation of their parents’ actions, for good or ill. Thus it is the responsibility of parents to set an example of empathy and wisdom.

4. Punishment distracts children from learning how to resolve conflict in an effective and humane way. A punished child becomes preoccupied with feelings of anger and fantasies of revenge, and is thus deprived of the opportunity to learn more effective methods of solving the problem at hand. Thus, a punished child learns little about how to handle or prevent similar situations in the future.

5.Punishment disrupts the parent and child bond, as it is not human nature to feel loving toward someone who hurts us. The true spirit of cooperation which every parent desires can arise only through a strong bond based on mutual feelings of love and respect. Punishment, even when it appears to work, can produce only superficially good behavior based on fear, which can only take place until the child is old enough to resist. In contrast, cooperation based on respect will last permanently, bringing many years of mutual happiness as the child and parent grow older.

6. Many parents never learned in their own childhood that there are positive ways of relating to children. When punishment does not accomplish the desired goals, and if the parent is unaware of alternative methods, punishment can escalate to more frequent and dangerous actions against the child.

7. Anger and frustration which cannot be safely expressed by a child become stored inside; angry teenagers do not fall from the sky. Anger that has been accumulating for many years can come as a shock to parents whose child now feels strong enough to express this rage. Punishment may appear to produce “good behavior” in the early years, but always at a high price, paid by parents and by society as a whole, as the child enters adolescence and early adulthood.

On hitting a child’s hand, Dr. Sears says: How tempting it is to slap those daring little hands! Many parents do it without thinking, but consider the consequences. Maria Montessori, one of the earliest opponents of slapping children’s hands, believed that children’s hands are tools for exploring, an extension of the child’s natural curiosity. Slapping them sends a powerful negative message. Psychologists studied a group of sixteen fourteen-month-olds playing with their mothers. When one group of toddlers tried to grab a forbidden object, they received a slap on the hand; the other group of toddlers did not receive physical punishment. In follow-up studies of these children seven months later, the punished babies were found to be less skilled at exploring their environment. Better to separate the child from the object or supervise his exploration and leave little hands unhurt.

And furthermore, Dr. Sears says, Hitting Devalues the parent: Parents who spank-control or otherwise abusively punish their children often feel devalued themselves because deep down they don’t feel right about their way of discipline. Often they spank (or yell) in desperation because they don’t know what else to do, but afterward feel more powerless when they find it doesn’t work. As one mother who dropped spanking from her correction list put it, “I won the battle, but lost the war. My child now fears me, and I feel I’ve lost something precious.”

“T,” I’m sure you have a wonderful son, but it seems to me that you and your son both would be much better off if you made a serious effort to figure out the ways your childhood is still affecting you, emotionally disengage your childhood trauma from your current life, and learn other, more effective, less putative or damaging methods to deal with your son.

On the matter of closure, I think you’re much closer to accuracy with the statement that we can move on WITHOUT having to find closure. Closer still would be the statement that instead of looking for “closure” on a loss, we can try to find meaning in the loss. This however, does not mean that we should go around telling the seriously bereaved that they should find meaning, which could well be offensive to them. Rather, we should allow people the space and time to take their own journey and discover what they need to discover. We can see the proof that people do eventually find, or try to find meaning in loss in the way they so often take up causes related to the lost one, find ways to honor the lost one. For example, Candy Lightner creates the organization MADD. (Mother’s Against Drunk Driving.) The Dorfs start a program for toddlers with special needs called Jumpstart in memory of their son. Another family plants a tree, or starts a local giveaway of bicycle helmets in memory of their son who was fatally injured when he fell off his bicycle.

Thank you again for sharing your story, T, and I hope you’ll consider what I’ve said about learning other ways than hitting to deal with your son. Do it for your son, in memory of my son. While I don’t think I’d call hand-slapping “abusive,” I think there are much better ways to deal with your beautiful little boy. How about a timeout for him? Or a system of positive reinforcement. So, for example, if he listens to mommy three times he gets a star, if he gets three stars, he gets something (little) he wants.

I wish you both the best, and I stand by my original suggestion that you get some counseling, individual rather than couple.

I’ve received letters from all over the world on my piece of rhetoric (otherwise known as a rant) in McSweeney’s about the misuse of the word “closure.” Some complimented my literary craft (which is nice), some came from people in the bereavement field, some from parents. I’ll post one or two of these letters soon; meanwhile here’s the link:

And speaking of “closure,” so far I haven’t heard anyone mention it in relation to the terrible death in Florida of Trayvon Martin, though no doubt some misguided soul will do so in the coming days. Over the weekend, however, I heard Geraldo Rivera say, “the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as Zimmerman is.” Wow. Similar to the “he raped her because she was dressed provocatively” defense, the argument may be a new low in an already bottom-scraping America, when someone with actual access to airwaves can get away with making an excuse like that for what really does appear to be a murder of a beautiful, unarmed seventeen year old boy walking down the street carrying some Skittles and an iced tea by an armed neighborhood watch “volunteer.” What happened for the idea of “freedom” these same people are always crowing about? Would that be freedom for everyone except those who want to wear hoodies?

According to the LA TIMES (and many other news sources): George Zimmerman, whose fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager has sparked nationwide protests over alleged racial profiling, had thought the entire incident would “blow over,” a friend said Sunday. The story goes on to make the claim that Joe Oliver, a ten year friend of Zimmerman, make the claim that he had never seen any indication Zimmerman, 28, is racist. Now Zimmerman is hiding amid death threats and demands for his arrest. I wouldn’t support death threats for anyone, but demands for his arrest? Absolutely.

“Walking while black” is a much, much better explanation for this outrageous act by Zimmerman, no matter what his friend says, and how sad for the loving parents of all the young black children in American, that they still, constantly have to worry about their children in a country that continues to be a terribly racist place, even WITH a black President. I have sat with bereaved parents black and white; their tears and pain are exactly the same.

And here’s another important point in this matter. It’s as difficult to even know what’s in people’s hearts, let alone to legislate what should be in their hearts. It’s for a court to determine whether this guy is or isn’t racist, and this is or isn’t a bias crime, and yet, unbelievably, because of the so called stand-your-ground law, which took effect in Florida in 2005, police could not arrest Zimmerman. Shame. Shame.

Well, we DO know this. Research has shown that access to the means to commit deadly violence is the best possible predictor of deadly violence. For example, if you have a gun in the house, it’s more likely that someone (usually NOT an intruder) will be shot and killed, or even that someone will commit suicide successfully. In view of this and the proliferation of senseless shootings in this country, it seems to me that the gun lobby has become far, far too powerful, scary powerful, and that the narcissistic, gun-crazed, irresponsible climate it has promoted and created and nurtured in the last thirty years is as much responsible for the shooting of this young boy as anything. How else can you explain the passage of a law like the stand your ground law, which permits people to use deadly force not only inside the home but on the street if they feel threatened? People feel threatened by all kinds of things, real and imagined. If you put a gun in every hand, as some in the gun lobby are pushing for, there will be more blood and death than there would be if you didn’t. A Priori. Why do we keep passing legislation that makes it more likely, rather than less, that this kind of thing will happen?

Who would have ever thought there could be a controversy around grief?

In the last few months, in my other (non-writing) life as a therapist, I have heard the devastating stories of several people seriously traumatized by their past contacts with the mental health system, people with a lasting legacy of pain from being (probably wrongly) prescribed powerful psychiatric drugs or placed against their will on a terrifying psych ward. I’m definitely not a conspiracy theorist, one who says things like “everything happens for a reason,” or assigns existential “meaning” to every happening, and so I’m sure it’s pure coincidence that I’ve heard so many stories like this lately. I obviously recognize that many dedicated people in the field are doing work that manages to be both life-saving and compassionate, yet these awful stories also underscore the need for folks setting the parameters in the field–the task force considering changes in the upcoming edition of the “bible” for clinicians, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (so-called “DSM V) to the various “diagnoses” around grief–to at least try to get it right. It seems to me that those of us working in the field who are honored every day to do this work, to witness people’s deepest pain, have a duty to at least speak out when it appears that a grave and possibly for some folks dangerous injustice is being contemplated.

Partly because of the experience I mention above, and partly as a response to a wonderful “Open Letter to to the DSM Task Force” posted by Dr. Joanne Cacciatore on her own website (which I’m linking to here) , I’d like to add my own voice to all those professionals and offended bereaved people weighing in on this disturbing and upsetting controversy.

As readers of this blog surely know, I too lost lost a child, my son, Michael, who died in 1994, and I’ve been living with, and thinking, studying, and writing about grief ever since. (Let me assure the reader that I’ve also done lots of other things, including recover my sense of humor.) My writing inspired by this includes a highly acclaimed novel, “Saving Elijah,” published by Putnam in June, 2000. After that I (eventually) went back to grad school to get a second masters degree in social work, mostly in order to work with the bereaved, even though I already knew from experience what one bereaved human being needs from another human being. More recently I’ve been working on a kind of memoir, which I’m calling, “Excerpts: Complicated Grief.” Included in the memoir is a recounting of the day I first heard in grad school that we were to label grief that lasts longer than two months (now according to all accounts of the upcoming DSM V apparently further reduced to two weeks) as pathology, call it “complicated,” call it a “disorder.” Even twelve years after my son’s death, this felt like an accusation. How could it not? How could they not see that this is damaging to the very people it purports to “help?” It was as if feeling the terrible sorrow I had felt, sometimes even still felt (still sometimes feel now), wasn’t “normal.” Yet I knew full well that it was “normal,” both from my own experience and from talking to scores, even hundreds of other bereaved parents.

I’ve written the memoir in the second person, and it moves backward from the present to the day of the loss, in an attempt to show how grief can (while still being “normal”) reverberate throughout every corridor of a life, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, sometimes as a source of wisdom, sometimes as source of pain or anxiety, but always present.

It opens on what would have been my son’s 21st birthday.

October 22, 2011, seventeen years after. Stand at the dryer, slap in wet clothes, try to form an image of a strapping young man turning twenty-one today. See only a sturdy toddler. Like a failed magic trick.

Go to the cemetery, brush away leaves, place stones on the brass and marble marker. Stand in the thick, humid air. Say Kaddish, forget the last part. Try to remember Michael but conjure up only bones in a tomb, shreds of boy and turtle, earthworms, fecund soil. Say the word fecund aloud, the hard k sound rattling the teeth. Remember your husband falling into the grave. Wonder why you come. Get back into your car pursing your lips as if tasting something moldy. Think of old metaphors, new similes. Grief always comes alone to a child’s grave. Grief is no longer a thundering, hissing monster. Grief is hollow now, like the blunt thud of rock on stone…….

The core problem comes in my view from the pathologizing of the normal human emotion of grief by calling it any kind of a disorder. And so whether you call it an “adjustment disorder related to bereavement,” and give it one year before you dial it up into an even more serious “disorder,” or whether it becomes “major depressive disorder” at two months, or at two weeks, seems to me secondary to the fact that it is called a disorder in the first place.

A child’s death? At two weeks you’re still in shock. You’re just getting started at two months. Maybe. Actually, it seems to me that it would actually be “abnormal” for a parent who lost a child to not feel overwhelmed and debilitated by sorrow (and to experience many of the attendant symptoms that echo but are not the same as those for depression) at two months out, let alone two weeks out. I would venture to say this is probably true even at one year. I remember visiting a friend of my mother’s who at age 100 was still talking about her fifteen-year-old son’s death in a car accident fifty years before as if it had happened that day. Personally, I would still call hers “normal” grief. And so the learned people figuring out the DSM seem to have had it backwards all along, and now seem to be doubling down on having it backwards.

I certainly agree that what people who have suffered loss need is (as Dr. Joanne says), human connection, caring, and compassion, or as the Lancet said: Time, Compassion, Remembrance, Empathy. I believe it’s an insult to think that a pill could be any kind of substitute for that. I remember a good, well meaning friend wanted me to take medication, but even though I was suffering mightily, walking around in my bathrobe (not only figuratively) for three years, I somehow knew that it would do no good at all to try and mask the symptoms, because a certain amount of tears needed to be shed. Luckily no clinician suggested medication. I’m not sure what I would have done, given my state of mind, if one had. The idea that we can “medicate” away the pain of grief isn’t about the bereaved, it’s about those who are uncomfortable with being witness to pain. As Rumi says,

We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours. I want to hold you close like a lute, so that we can cry out with loving. Would you rather throw stones at a mirror? I am your mirror and here are the stones.

In other words, the healing from the pain is in the pain. So it is.

My favorite definition of compassion is the Buddhist one: “Willingness to be close to suffering.” That’s what I do, what all of us who want to help do, we open our hearts to someone’s suffering. We witness. We don’t try to fix it. I always say: Be present. Be humble. Be patient. Observe. Reflect. Allow silence. Don’t judge. Accept. Listen

It seems to me that this isn’t only about the pharmaceutical industry, it’s even more about the insurance industry, which seems to be in the business of not paying for whatever it can possibly get out of. (And not just in the area of grief.) In this case the insurance industry seems to want to get out of any paying for anything other than that which has medication as the first line of treatment, and which labels grief a “mental illness,” or a “disorder” of some kind (an outcome that can stay in a person’s record forever, with terrible, terrible consequences).

It’s a sickening conundrum, it puts people who want to provide support for the bereaved who seek it in a terrible position, and of course it puts the bereaved in an even worse position. Aren’t we trying to help them? Surely we are. And one of the things we must do to help them is “normalize” what they’re feeling. Yes, I wailed at the top of my lungs in a hospital room, but so would you.

As clinicians, we have the “V” bereavement code, but insurance generally doesn’t pay for treatment if you use this as a diagnosis. To receive payment from insurance, it has to be a “disorder.” And so to get insurance to cover our effort to help people make their way through grief, we are actually forced to call it some kind of disorder, even when we know it isn’t. (This is, by the way, actually true for many situations, for example anger management. Insurance won’t pay for people looking for help with “anger issues” unless you slap on a some kind of a “disorder” label.

Some, no doubt, will think I’m a hopeless idealist, or a radical left winger for believing that Americans, the “richest” country on earth, ought to provide universal health care that enables people to get the health care they need, no matter what their financial or job situation. I don’t care. I still must speak the truth as I see it. And there simply ought to not only be health care for all, there should be some other terminology that acknowledges the debilitating nature of what I’ve called “big time grief,” and also provides coverage for people to get the proper, compassionate psychological support they need in difficult times.

All of us can be hopeful that the outcry from the grief community around this issue will, like the outcry to de-pathologize homosexuality in the 1970s, result in a de-pathologization of grief. From a practical standpoint, under our current disaster of a health insurance system, we are required to diagnose some kind of “disorder” or there is no insurance coverage for clinical services. In the absence of a complete rethinking of the whole system (oh, for such an outcome!; let’s just hope the misguided politicians won’t succeed in their threat to repeal the so-called “Obamacare” coverage for everyone), we can only hope that whatever happens, good clinicians (and particularly psychiatrists with their ready-meds) recognize that the DSM is at best an imperfect guide, and can tell the difference between grief and either adjustment “disorder,” or major depressive “disorder,” whatever must be recorded as a diagnosis to get coverage.

On Sunday for a while I watched the reading of the names at Ground Zero. It brought up my own recollections of that day, of course. We lived directly on Long Island Sound at that time, and had an amazing, unique view across the water to the lower half of Manhattan Island. That day was so clear you could practically see the windows in the Towers, which rose in the distance like a number eleven on steroids.

We were building our home at the time, living in a cottage on the property. That morning, fifteen or so men, mostly of Portuguese ethnicity, were putting on the roof shingles. I was in the cottage watching the Today Show when they cut to the scene. Katie Couric said, “A small plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.” Didn’t even vaguely look like a small plane to me. How could Katie even say that with a straight face?

In the first of many reality checks of the day, I went outside to affirm that what I was seeing on television was actually happening, or maybe vice versa. Indeed it was real; you could see the first tower burning across the Sound, smoke rising up into the sky in a huge dark plume that already dwarfed both towers. The fifteen Portuguese roofers were standing on the plywood up there, transfixed. And silent, except they had a radio going, a newscast, I think–in Portuguese. A few of them looked at me, maybe wondering if they should continue. I didn’t know. I went back into the house just in time to see the second Tower hit. I began to make my check-in-with-family phone calls.

When the first tower fell, I happened to be outside looking at the actual view, and it seemed like a disappearing act from that 20ish mile distance. One moment, two buildings; the next, one.

An hour or so later, our neighbor across the street came over, distraught. His wife was working at the time in Tower 2, 84th floor, and he hadn’t heard from her. (She did manage to make her way down, though lost many of her colleagues, and this couple went to memorial services for months.).

All day long, strangers kept stopping by the house just to just stand and witness the thing from our vantage point, the plume of thick dark smoke spreading like a halo over Manhattan.

Ten years later, as I listened to all those people read the names of their dead, I couldn’t help thinking of my own loss, though it had nothing to do with 9/11. (How could I help it when James Taylor played a song I used to sing to my toddler son, You Can Close Your Eyes?) It seems to me that the reading of names stems from a deeply human, universal need to bring the dead back into the world of the living. I know I feel grateful when someone mentions my son or speaks his name. And too, I found it deeply moving to hear each person offer their personal thoughts, prayers, and feelings, which seemed mostly unscripted and authentic to me. So rare nowadays. Everywhere we turn, we find ourselves inundated by so much that is packaged and canned that it seems we have been unalterably changed as a people, possibly unable to identify what should be obviously false. Maybe Katie Couric unquestioningly repeating what she had been told, that a small plane had hit the tower, was some kind of watershed 1984 moment.

In the aftermath of all this, the Bruised Muse would like to express a thought or two about our survival not as individuals who’ve suffered loss, but as a country. Get ready, since this is a rant.

A few days ago a report came out that the United States of America had spent 3.3 TRILLION dollars (that’s Trillion with a T) on the two main wars we’ve engaged in since 9/11. Supposedly, we went to these wars because of 9/11, the Bush Administration touting the idea that we had to be on a war footing. Yet most if not all of the ACTUAL victories against the terrorists, before and after 9/11, have been either special ops or police work.

Whatever the reason the Bush Administration wanted the Iraq war–maybe Rumsfeld wanted to test his new war toys or theory, or Bush the younger wanted revenge–it should be clear now to anyone with any critical thinking skills at all that the war was scandalously, monumentally unnecessary. It amazes me that all these years later, no one has been called to pay for the lies they told to convince the country to support that total bait and switch operation. Worse, that Administration was so effective in telling their lies that many American citizens, voting citizens, apparently STILL believe there was some relationship between Al Queada and Saddam Hussein. The only problem with democracy is that anyone can vote. Which of course is also its main strength. Yet a huge problem now, in my view, is that our population has become so gullible as a result of ever more sophisticated packaging and canning (ie marketing/pr) that in the absence of a skeptical press (not a polarized press, but a skeptical one), Americans who can’t or won’t educate themselves can STILL vote.

And then there’s Afghanistan, which I supported in the beginning, although I thought they should have put more money and special ops personnel into cornering Bin Laden at Bora Bora, which they would have if they hadn’t been set on their Iraq bait and switch. But it’s TEN YEARS LATER, and I recently heard a NY TIMES reporter on NPR ((than God for NPR and the NY TIMES, what’s left of it) that things are worse than ever there. Consider the attack just today on the US embassy there.

I mention all this because, I’ll say it again, WE HAVE NOW SPENT 3.3 TRILLION. Isn’t THIS a HUGE part of the reason we’re now bankrupt? Are we so lost that rather than speaking the truth about why we’re bankrupt, we have a group of politicians of apparently growing influence proposing (and the people BUYING) that the way out of bankruptcy is to give more money to the richest of us, cut programs that give food to babies, take the people who’ve just gotten health coverage off again, and roll back all the regulatory progress we’ve made in the last fifty years?

THIS will save the country? What country? Do they really think that unregulated corporations interested only in profit will police themselves? Do they REALLY want to be poisoned by the water, air, food? Or maybe they LIKE the idea of seeing another Triangle Shirt Factory fire?

It’s bad enough that a miserable creature like Ann Coulter can get away with saying on national television that the she’d never seen so many enjoying their husband’s deaths as the 9/11 widows; my guess is she’d actually revel in seeing little girls jump out of windows (as long as they’re liberals jumping).

But my goodness, where are we as a country when they can call a moderate like Obama a SOCIALIST and so many believe it, share it, like it, tweet it?

And when on a nationally televised debate of so-called mainstream Republican candidates, all except one says he (or she) doesn’t believe in climate change or evolutionary science. Which of course, means non-belief in every interconnected branch of science too, from archeology to zoology?

And when on the same debate the moderator asks the leading candidate if we should let a thirty year old uninsured person die because he doesn’t have health care, and the candidate says “Yes.” AND THE AUDIENCE GOES WILD IN SUPPORT.

Well, calling Barack Obama a socialist is truly laughable, but these people are, plain and simple, extremists, and they seem to me to want the country to go back to a time when the people gathered in the town square to watch the hanging. They’re all saying they’re scared of Obama, they want their country back. Is THIS their country? A country that cheers on the idea of letting a 30 year old die because he doesn’t have or can’t get insurance?

Honestly, we should ALL shudder at the thought of someone like Rick Perry (or Sarah Palin or Michele Bachman) as President. These people, for all their patriotic blathering, don’t even seem to believe in democracy, they seem to support some kind of fundamentalist, anti-intellectual, anti-science theocracy. I’ve been reading Eric Larsen’s book: In the Garden of the Beasts. In Hitler’s Germany, the takeover of a government and a people was gradual and insidious. Demagogues start by subtly whipping up underlying biases and fears, and then offering easy answers that people cling to to allay those fears. And no one notices the true implication of what’s happening until until it’s too late. This should chill the blood. Electing some of these people could easily turn us into those who attacked us.

The Bruised Muse has long been a fan of writer, Emma Donoghue. I loved and admired her novel, Slammerkin. I was completely unprepared for ROOM. I had resisted reading this one for a long time, since I’d heard that the novel was about a kidnapped woman and her child held captive in an 11×11 cell. I don’t generally read formulaic suspense novels any more, particularly creepy serial killer ones, and this sounded to me like a typical suspense plot. I also wondered how a novel written in the voice of a five-year-old could possibly have anything to teach me, or even hold my interest all the way though. Boy, was I misguided. ROOM has been haunting my dreams. ROOM has intruded on my thoughts. ROOM makes me want to weep with envy at the author’s artistry and accomplishment. ROOM has even renewed my hope (well, a small bit of hope) that we can as a species survive. ROOM IS JUST BRILLIANT. BRILLIANT. BRILLIANT.

I’m often puzzled at the commercial success of many so-called “literary” novels I see on the bestseller list. I wonder, What is it about this particular book that so very MANY people connect with? Why this book, and not that book? What is this one’s magic? What theme does this novel consider that resonates with so many people right now? And why didn’t the book I read last week and found far more interesting, well written, engaging, or brilliant connect with enough others to make it too, or even instead of this one?

No one needs to read stories about made-up characters, of course, so it seems to me that (leaving Oprah aside) a novel succeeds commercially because millions of people recommend it, one by one (or social network by social network). That is, when one reader feels so moved that, without any reason at all (other than perhaps generosity), he or she will say to a friend, “You’ve got to read this. This is important. This will teach you something about life.”Multiply that formula by millions and you have a bestseller, in this case possibly even a classic.

ROOM is that rare book whose success is completely right and understandable. Unique, artful, poignant, authentic in its voice and characters, and beautifully, brilliantly written without flourishes or writerly self-consciousness, ROOM grabs you from the first minute and refuses to let go. Yet many (well, some) books do all that.

ROOM’S wisdom comes upon you slowly, like the light of a sunrise. In telling the story from the child’s point of view, Donoghue protects us from the horror, just as Ma protects her child. In focusing so tightly on the relationship between this devoted and inventive mother and this boy, by observing so clearly every single object and moment in its character’s 11 x 11 world, ROOM manages to illuminate the entire World.

I think ROOM connects with so many because it speaks to a certain planetary zeitgeist. Everywhere on earth, things seem to be spiraling out of control, and Donoghue has written an unexpectedly hopeful book that speaks to human resilience in adversity, our capacity to survive. ROOM comments powerfully on our culture of gluttony, and profoundly teaches us about the nature and meaning of reality, how we construct our realities.

ROOM is also, of course, about the bond between mother and child. Most psychologists agree that failure to form a bond of attachment with at least one human being in the very early years can have devastating lifelong consequences. In my social work practice, I see many people who seem so damaged by early neglect, parental cruelty, selfishness or narcissism, and/or simple bad mothering/fathering, that it almost seems nearly impossible to effect repairs. ROOM forces you to note (and believe) that this remarkable woman, though she lives in constant personal terror, is managing to save her son by simply using her own good sense, subjugating her own needs to the needs of her child, and making the best of what she has for the sake of her child.And by saving her child, she also saves herself. And the hooked reader can’t help wonder about what will happen to Jack and Ma, even after that last powerful scene.The Bruised Muse has faith that what Ma has done will, in psychological terms, will be, “good enough.” How extraordinary. To wonder what will happen to made-up characters. Now THAT’S suspense. And suspense is another reason the book succeeds.By adhering broadly to the outline of a creepy suspense novel, yet being completely without creep, ROOM draws in the reader looking for “suspense,” but effectively turns the genre inside out.

The Bruised Muse also found that ROOM has aroused her long suppressed desire to write fiction again. (Wait. No. Don’t. Push it away. Don’t be a fool.)

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Welcome!

Welcome to my psychotherapy website. I am a licensed clinical social worker with a private practice in Stamford, Connecticut. I also facilitate bereavement groups at the Center for Hope in Darien, Connecticut and in Westchester County, New York. I believe that human beings have an absolute capacity for change, and can also find meaning in even the most profound of losses. When I sit with you, whether in group or with you as an individual, I am present, open, empathetic, non-judgmental, and committed to helping you become all you wish to be, and CAN be. On this blog I post announcements about my psychology related activities, such as bereavement groups, writing for healing groups and speaking gigs. Also, I post interesting psychology-related articles, and articles about grief, written by me or curated from around the web. I have a separate website about my novels, playwriting, and writing projects: www.frandorf.ink. For that, click the link in the tabs above.

Hours & Info

I am available weekdays, some evenings. Call me at 203-536-3531 for a free phone consultation and appointment.

My services

My services are completely confidential. My specialty is bereavement, but I also treat anxiety, depression, relationship issues, self esteem, anger and impulse control, trauma, and much more. I see adults, adolescents, and couples in individual therapy. I also facilitate several bereavement groups, one with parents who've lost children, and another with seniors who've lost their partners. I use an eclectic mix of methods, creative and traditional, to achieve goals we set together, including narrative therapy, cognitive/behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, mindfulness, meditation, and expressive arts. As a longtime writer, I have developed the "write to heal" method, and can employ writing as a healing tool with my clients, if they're interested.